irooster VS ghostedit

I just published the source code for the first app I ever built, all the way back in 2003: https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/irooster

It "turns your Mac into a $2,000 alarm clock."

I originally made it because I had endless amounts of trouble waking up for my morning classes in college, and found that the only alarm that could get me up was a subwoofer right underneath my bed. So I hooked a 2.1 speaker system up to my Mac, wrote a little app to start playing an iTunes playlist at a particular time, and ended up productizing it.

It was never a huge commercial success; I think the best I ever did with it was about $2,000 in sales one month after Apple featured it in a newsletter (different times!), but it taught me several important lessons about building a commercial software product that still guide me today.

Enjoy checking out my super janky code!

I have a 10 year old project on Github. I even have it on my resume. The code is nothing like what I would write today, but I think that's implied by it being 10 years old. And I'm personally quite proud of what I produced, even though I would do it differently now.

Project is a WSYIWYG editor (https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit) if anyone is interested. I wouldn't recommend anyone use it these days, but it could be interesting as a relatively small codebase to learn from if anyone is interested in how contenteditable in web browsers works.

Ah, that was a dark time for WYSIWYG editing on the web. I actually made my own back in that era [0] (well a little later, but when TinyMCE and CKEditor were still the goto solutions), and getting it to work cross-browser when IE6 was still a thing and had no dev tools was an absolute nightmare.

[0]: https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit